Traditional art and sketching

Peruse our Sketching from the Imagination series, start your own sketch journal, or try your hand at clay sculpting! If you’re a complete beginner looking for a new hobby, or even an experienced artist looking for inspiration and workflow insights, our traditional art and sketching resources have plenty to offer!

3D digital art

Covering a wide variety of software and approaches, our books, magazines, and eBooks are there to offer you the support and motivation you need. Whether you want to sculpt a monster in ZBrush or create a stylized character in 3ds Max, take a look at our range to start your next project!

3D Art - Modelling, Digital and Game Art

Learn how to quickly turn ordinary photographs into new concepts with this handy eBook on photo manipulation and matte painting techniques. The four chapters cover how to use blending modes, textures, brush techniques, over-painting, and combining 2D and3D techniques to create concepts and special effects. Featuring tutorials from Mark Kolobaev, Rotyslav Zagornov, David Roya, and Mathieu ‘FreaksFx’ Roszak this eBook is the go-to guide for time saving ways to create new concepts.

3dtotal’s free magazine was a hit at last year’s SIGGRAPH – thank you to everyone who picked up a copy or downloaded the digital version! Unfortunately we can’t be at SIGGRAPH this year, but to keep up the sharing spirit, we’re releasing this free edition of 3dcreative instead. This issue contains all the usual features and inspirational artwork, at no cost!

If you’re a fan of sci-fi and monsters, you’re in for a treat with this new issue. We interview Seb Barker, VFX supervisor behind the upcoming Monsters: Dark Continent, and Capcom artist Naru Omori, who’s worked on such videogame series as Resident Evil and Dead Rising. We meet sculptor Jake Anderson’s clay monsters, learn how to create sci-fi vehicles in 3ds Max and Maya, and look at modeling hard-surface robots in ZBrush.

Welcome to the celebratory issue 100 of 3dcreative magazine! To celebrate 100 months of 3dcreative, we speak to 3D printing master, Joshua Harker and digital sculpting hero, Rafael Grassetti about their thoughts on the future of 3D art. And, as ever, we have our monthly crop of awesome tutorials, project overviews and ZBrush sketchbooks for you to devour.

The Unreal games engine is a hugely versatile system that has been used to power a variety of best-selling video games. In The Unreal Game Engine, environment artist Andrew Finch looks at how to create game levels from scratch using the free Unreal Development Kit, starting with modeling the environment. He then addresses the two different ways in which you can create accessories for your scene – modeling in 3ds Max and importing them, or creating them directly in UDK – before adding textures and lighting. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be a level designer and wanted some practical experience, then look no further than The Unreal Game Engine.

This issue's awesome cover image is the creation of Pedro Conti, who created this character for the short animation One More Beer, which the talented 3D artist talked to us about when we caught up with him for this month's interview.

Vue is an amazing piece of software which is widely used through many areas of the CG Industry, in fact I am sure many of you will have enjoyed a Vue environment in a blockbuster movie in the past without realizing it. As with most CG packages Vue provides another valuable outlet for your active imagination and provides a tool for creating stunning results in a short period of time. In this eBook Alex Popescu will be exploring and explaining ways to use the versatile tools in Vue to create stunning environments and back-drops. Vue is an exceptionally versatile piece of software and can meet the needs of almost any artist in any situation, for that reason Alex will be talking us through a variety of ways to use the software to get the best results. If you are interested in Vue as a piece of software, or if you are thinking of having a go at creating CG environments, this eBook is a must have!

Photoshop is becoming more and more important in the work flow of a 3D artist. If you are creating 3D stills using Photoshop is a great way to complete your image and add effects quickly and effectively. In this eBook tutorial series Photoshop Pro Richard Tilbury will be showing how to totally transform an image in Photoshop. We will start each chapter with a textured 3D model. That model will then be put into Photoshop where Rich will turn it into a polished image. Using Photoshop can be daunting to 3D artists as many see is as a tool for digital painters, but Rich has provided simple step by step techniques and methods that will transform your work flow forever.

This six chapter eBook aims to show the value of post-production and, more specifically, the ways in which Photoshop can be used to aid the 3D pipeline. Over the course of the tutorial we shall focus on the various tools and techniques on offer in Photoshop that are frequently used to improve 3D renders.

Suitable for all 3D software, and also using Photoshop, this eBook teaches you how to create a fantasy scene inspired by real world architecture, and how to use reference photos to get stunning effects quickly and easily. Also covered is a great system that can be used to quickly create high quality 3D stills.

We're tackling the texturing of our Next-Gen characters this month in chapter five - the penultimate part - of 3DCreative's tutorial series for 3ds Max/Maya/LightWave and modo. Joseph Harford, Gavin Goulden, James Busby and John Hayes are all back and in top form to take you step-by-step through this leg of your character creation journey.